Kyle Chandler (as John Rayburn) and Ben Mendelsohn (as Danny Rayburn) in the Netflix Original Series Bloodline.
Saeed Adyani/Netflix
As last week’s premiere of Netflix’s Bloodline drew near, most of the media attention focused on Kyle Chandler—including a rollicking ride-along profile in The Hollywood Reporter. And that makes sense; it’s his triumphant return to television after his Emmy-winning turn as Coach Eric Taylor on Friday Night Lights. But while Chandler’s the one delivering the voiceovers on Netflix’s highly-touted family drama, he’s not really the lead on Bloodline. That honor stealthily goes to Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, who takes yet another small step toward the kind of big-time recognition his recent performances deserve.
Set in the Florida Keys, Bloodline centers on the Rayburn family: parents Robert (Sam Shepard) and Sally (Sissy Spacek) run a successful and beloved inn; John (Chandler) is a county sheriff; Meg (Linda Cardellini) works as an attorney; Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) works at a local harbor and has his father’s anger issues. The pilot begins as eldest son and black sheep Danny (Mendelsohn) returns home. He’s the character who catalyzes all the action in one way or another, from his father’s trauma over a past tragic accident to his brothers’ guilt over lying after witnessing a violent incident as kids. Everything from the various Rayburn family history threads depend on Danny sticking around, waiting to discover one key detail he can use to quench his bitterness and twist one his siblings into knots. He’s the dangerously calm eye at the center of a familial hurricane, causing secrets to shake loose and wounds of the past to sting once more. It’s the most important part in the story, which is exactly why the show’s creators (Daniel Zelman and Damages creators Todd and Glenn Kessler) cast Mendelsohn as soon as they’d landed Chandler.
Mendelsohn has been on the fringes of some notable films in the past five years, but he’s been a high-profile actor for decades. He was a young heartthrob in Australian films and television shows dating back in the 1980s, when he won an Australian Oscar (now known as the AACTAs) for Best Supporting Actor as the roguish rugby player who couldn’t stay out of trouble in The Year My Voice Broke (http://ift.tt/1BL5HAQ). He came up alongside other Aussie actors like Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and Noah Taylor—but whereas the other three jumped to the US and the UK to find international fame, Mendelsohn mostly remained in Australia, only occasionally popping up in bigger international films like The New World, Knowing, and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia.
But when Jackie Weaver scored a Best Supporting Actress Academdy Award nomination for Australian drama Animal Kingdom in 2010—a movie in which Mendelsohn appeared alongside her—Hollywood paid attention. That film won Mendelsohn another AACTA, but it also led to more roles in America. He played a drug-addled crook in Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, the grimy mentor and bank robbing partner to Ryan Gosling’s motorcycle stuntman in The Place Beyond The Pines, Jessa’s father on HBO’s Girls, and most visibly in The Dark Knight Returns as the sniveling Wayne Enterprises board member who Bane.
Earlier this year, Mendelsohn showed up in two Sundance films this year that got picked up for distribution: frontier period piece Slow West, and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s gambling film Mississippi Grind. “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but the first time I had ever seen [him] was in The Place Beyond the Pines,” says Fleck. “But he has such a wonderful presence that we just kind of fell in love with him on that first meeting. We just looked at each other, nodded, and offered him the part on the spot without even consulting with our producing team.”
Two years ago in a Grantland piece around the release of The Place Beyond The Pines, Sean Fennessey posited that Mendelsohn “seems one starring role—might we suggest a downtrodden garbageman-turned-bankrobber?—away from transitioning out of That Guy.” Danny Rayburn may not be a sanitation worker, but it’s a role that Mendelsohn was born to play—and might just the casting bridge he needed.
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